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Apr 23, 2025Taylor’s rapturous explorations of womanhood are torn through the mundanity of growing older, the depressive nature of Groundhog Day-normality and the catharsis of splitting even further as age makes concrete her contradictions. Across this - her most concentrated and burning record - Taylor’s hardened Sheffield-isms float through the tearjerker soul of a thousand women.
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Apr 23, 2025The third Self Esteem album that takes the best parts of Prioritise Pleasure and her debut Compliments Please, and turns it all up to 10.
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Apr 23, 2025Rebecca Lucy Taylor's third album as Self Esteem sharpens what’s always been at the core of her musical identity: the tension between frank vulnerability and pop maximalism.
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Apr 29, 2025‘A Complicated Woman’ is not your average pop record. Then again, Self Esteem is not your average pop star. This is an album born for the stage.
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Apr 28, 2025A Complicated Woman brims with exemplary vocals, winning beats, and Taylor’s seamless pivots from the risqué to the empathic to the exhortative.
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Apr 23, 2025Don't let the bubblegum lightness obscure her visionary talent. [May 2025, p.105]
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Apr 29, 2025Corners are filled and silences left for dramatic effect. Sometimes the effect saturates, leaving certain numbers in the shadows of the grandest moments. .... However, some of the best moments come when Taylor sets aside the strings and choir, putting the focus on a driving beat.
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Apr 25, 2025The album as a whole is a safer affair than Taylor’s previous releases, but for the most part it’s very good, and its cohesion isn’t necessarily a weakness. Still, it’s hard not to approach a new Self Esteem album expecting some kind of life-changing revelation, six months of therapy condensed into an hour-long speedrun.
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UncutApr 23, 2025A predominantly female choir features throughout, boosting Taylor's crises of confidence on "Focus Is Power" and "What Now" into communal rallying cries. But there is fun here too. [May 2025, p.39]
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Apr 25, 2025At times the whole jazz-hands-emoted, Original Cast Recording! vibe can grate; the stageyness undercutting the intimacy of Taylor’s sharp, literate lyrics. At others, the evident effort of performance plays winkingly well into the choreography of her self-dramatising self-analysis.
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Apr 25, 2025Taylor aimed for “sing-along stadium tropes” on this new album, mainly achieved via a sizeable chorus who lend their lungs to many of its tracks, often to rousing effect. .... Despite the choral boost, Taylor’s music only really unleashes its full power on stage — it deserves to be experienced live.
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Apr 24, 2025A Complicated Woman is a bold experiment that you couldn’t call a failure – there are good things there, that underline how vastly improved the world of pop is for having Self Esteem in it – but doesn’t always come off with the efficacy Taylor might have hoped.
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Apr 23, 2025There's something of the counsellor's couch about these songs, a record that trembles between acute self-awareness, self-laceration and self-preservation in its quest for "the deep blue OK". [Jun 2025, p.82]
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Apr 29, 2025A Complicated Woman’s wide-reaching, mollifying remit feels like Taylor trying to be too much to too many people, to live up to the validation that her last album occasioned. Its best moments are the most personal.